Friday, November 16, 2012

Pisces Constellation

The silver stars and silhouette of Pisces the two fish are illustrated in this handmade block print. Pisces (♓) is the twelfth astrological sign in the Zodiac. I printed an edition of 8 prints, 7.5 inches by 10 inches (19 cm by 24.8 cm) on lovely, handmade, Japanese kozo (or mulberry) paper with a deckle edge. Since the paper is handmade, there is some small variation in size and the edge of each sheet. The word Pisces and symbol ♓ appear at the bottom of the image. The lines linking the constellation appear in black-on-silver or silver-on-black as appropriate. There's a star cluster, shown as a circle, and the lines for the constellations of Pegasus, Triangulum and Aries.

If you imagined all celestial bodies we see in the night sky as mapped onto a sphere (the Celestial Sphere) around our Earth, the ecliptic would be the line you would draw to map the apparent path of the Sun through the various constellations. The ecliptic is marked as the dashed line in this print.

As I was putting this in my shop I noticed that I now have 1600 hearts! I do love seeing all those hearts and thank every single person whose added my shop to their favorites. While I'm at it, thanks to the 543 Etsy followers (who can see all new things in my shop or favorites), 506 FB fans, and 665 twitter followers.